OWEN, Hugh (1604-by 1671), of Orielton, Castlemartin and Landshipping, Martletwy, Pemb.

In the fashion usual among the Welsh gentry, the Owen family claimed direct descent from a Welsh noble, in this case, Hwfa ap Cynddelw, a twelfth-century figure whose name headed the pedigrees of the first of the 15 tribes of Gwynedd. The Owens were thus originally from Anglesey, and Owen’s great-grandfather, Owen ap Hugh of Bodeon, sat for the island borough of Newborough (Rhosfair) in 1545 before its separate representation in Parliament was removed. Owen ap Hugh’s son married a Pembrokeshire heiress in 1571 and thus brought to the family an extensive estate of five manors and more than 6,800 acres centred on Orielton, a manor in Castlemartin, south-west of Pembroke. Hugh Owen was a minor when his father died, and was still one when his grandfather, Sir Hugh Owen, left him the Pembrokeshire estates in 1614. Sir Hugh divided the Pembrokeshire and Anglesey estates again by leaving the Bodeon lands to his younger son, Hugh Owen’s uncle.27Phillips, Mems. Owen of Orielton, 26; HP Commons 1509-58; HP Commons 1604-29. With extensive property around the borough of Pembroke, as well as leased property within it, Owen could exercise a strong and credible claim to the seat of Pembroke, but nothing is recorded of any contribution he may have made to the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628. During the 1630s, Owen served as high sheriff of the county and two terms as mayor of Pembroke, and by 1637 had become sufficiently trusted by the government to be included among the deputy lieutenants of Pembrokeshire. He was serving in his second term as mayor of Pembroke when writs were despatched for what would become the first Parliament of 1640. His election for Haverfordwest, not Pembroke, was doubtless at least in part an acknowledgement of the convention that serving mayors were not returned to the Commons for their boroughs. His address as given on the indenture was Landshipping, an estate nearer to Haverfordwest than to Pembroke.

There were two men named Owen in the Short Parliament of 1640, and the two committee nominations recorded in the Journal of ‘Mr Owen’ seem more likely to refer to Thomas Owen than to Hugh. Both were on legal topics, on abuses in conveyancing (21 Apr.) and on probate administration (1 May): Thomas Owen of Shrewsbury was a barrister.28CJ ii. 8a, 17b. By the time that elections were held for the second Parliament of the year, Hugh Owen was eligible again to stand for Pembroke, and was returned there for a third time. He was not quick to make his mark on the proceedings of the House. He first came to the attention of his colleagues for an alleged misdemeanour. On 30 November 1640 John Pym brought into the House a petition of William Jenkins, a merchant who alleged that Owen had provided John Poyer with credentials that bestowed parliamentary privilege on him, despite the fact that Poyer was not Owen’s servant.29CJ ii. 39a; D’Ewes (N), 82. Poyer was in fact a prominent Pembroke glover and merchant, who traded in a range of commodities with Bristol, was a collector of the subsidy, and bailiff of his borough in 1633-4 when Owen was mayor.30Poyer’s Vindication (1649), 2 (E.548.31); ‘Mayors of Pembroke’, West Wales Recs. v. 121. In response to the complaint against him, Owen withdrew Poyer’s privilege, but continued to insist that the merchant was his servant.31CJ ii. 40b; D’Ewes (N), 88.

Owen made the affirmation of the Protestation promptly, with other Members, on 3 May 1641, and on 5 August, when the House debated various means of bringing in money to pay off the armies in the north, offered to lend £7,000 from the estate of Sir Thomas Canon, a Haverfordwest gentleman who had made his will in 1628, making Owen an executor. Another executor, Thomas Boyland, had recently died, and his own will, proved two days before Owen’s speech, had made secure the element of Canon’s inheritance for which he himself had been responsible. Boyland’s will had also confirmed that Canon’s will continued to be a subject of dispute, and so Owen’s evidently opportunist offer would probably have complicated matters still further. It remains unclear whether the money, in the hands of a London goldsmith, was ever appropriated by Parliament.32Procs. LP vi. 216, 220; PROB11/187, f. 34. On 10 August, Owen was knighted, and the following day was made a baronet, strengthening the general impression that he was not hostile to the court and had no meaningful links to the parliamentary opposition at Westminster to the king.

At the end of August Owen was named as a commissioner in Pembrokeshire for disarming recusants. Four months later, on 3 December, came his first known position of responsibility in this Parliament, when he was required to help manage a conference with the Lords on the despatch of a punitive force to Ireland. In the wake of the Irish rebellion, Members from constituencies in the west of England and Wales were particularly anxious about the prospect of an armed Catholic invasion from across the Irish Sea, and this subject became Owen’s principal parliamentary interest. On 15 December Owen was included among the recipients of a letter from the privy council, warning of an alleged popish threat to Conway in north Wales.33CJ ii. 331a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 199-200. Two days later he came up with ideas for raising cavalry for Ireland, ideas which impressed his colleagues in the House sufficiently for them to have recommended his proposals to the high command of the expeditionary force then in preparation, with a stipulation that Owen should be present when army commissions were allocated.34CJ ii. 347b, 352a. On 27 December, he was named to his first committee, on the report by William Jephson* on conditions in the Irish province of Munster.35CJ ii. 357b.

Ireland remained Owen’s preoccupation during the early months of 1642. The Irish emergency was the spur to revisiting the commissions for suppressing recusancy, and he was included in the committee convened to do this (20 Jan.). On 28 January he spoke to advise the House that Irish ships had captured those of some Barnstaple merchants, and produced a letter from his friend John Poyer which described the arrival in Milford Haven of ‘stark naked’ English refugees from Ireland and reported rumours of an imminent invasion of Pembrokeshire. Owen was subsequently named to a committee to draft instructions to the mayors of Bristol and Pembroke to seize any ships from the Irish port of Wexford.36CJ ii. 387a, 401a; PJ i. 208-9. On 7 February, on a motion of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, he was awarded £100 to distribute to the victims of the Irish rebellion taking refuge in Pembrokeshire; Liverpool and Cornwall were also granted comparable sums.37CJ ii. 417a; PJ i. 291, 299. The following day, Owen was among the committee charged with considering the king’s objection to a speech in which John Pym had asserted that Irish rebel leaders were coming to England by virtue of royal warrants.38CJ ii. 420a. One Irish noble who fell under suspicion was Lord Delvin, arrested in north Wales, but Owen spoke to point out that any warrant Delvin enjoyed from the king had been rescinded.39PJ i. 319.

This proved to be Owen’s busiest period of activity as a Member. The focus of business shifted soon afterwards, when he was part of a delegation (14 Feb. 1642) to go to the king with representatives of the Lords, bearing the militia bill, to which the king gave an evasive answer coupled with an ominous report that he was sending the queen to Holland. A week later, Sir Robert Cooke successfully moved that Owen be given leave to go into the country.40CJ ii. 431b, 442b, 457a; PJ i. 475. Before he left, he took from the Commons clerk, Henry Elsynge, a list of ships detained at Milford Haven, to be given to the lord admiral, Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland.41CJ ii. 458a. Owen had returned by 28 May, when he was named to the committee on alleged misdemeanours in Anglesey of soldiers of the expeditionary force bound for Ireland.42CJ ii. 591a; PJ ii. 383-4. He revisited a familiar theme on 4 June, when he made an impassioned speech in the House on the defensive effort in Pembrokeshire and what he saw as the unwarranted neglect of west Wales, ‘so little regarded in respect of their safety as if they were no part of the kingdom, lying open to spoil and invasion from the west parts of Ireland.’43PJ iii. 16. He obtained an order to brief Northumberland again and to ask for naval protection for Milford Haven.44CJ ii. 605a. On 8 June, by virtue of his north Wales interests, he was included in the committee investigating the sexual outrages alleged against John Griffith II*.45CJ ii. 613b.

As the gravity of the political gulf between king and Parliament pushed even the Irish crisis to one side during the summer of 1642, Owen continued to focus his attention on the threat to western parts of the country. He promised on 10 June to contribute two horses for the parliamentary cause, and joined a delegation to ask the Merchant Strangers for a loan. He was also galvanized by the arrest and imprisonment in Plymouth of his associate, John Poyer, whose offence appeared to have been the detaining of ships without the approval of the mayor and corporation. On Owen’s motion, a letter was sent for Poyer’s release (27 June).46CJ ii. 623a; PJ iii. 140, 474. The following month, he announced to the House a further threat to Milford Haven, this time from marauding ‘Turkish’ pirates (21 July), and with members from western ports was named to a committee to consider the latest intelligence from Plymouth.47PJ iii. 243, CJ ii. 683b. Around the same time, Owen was instrumental in sending grain supplies from west Wales to the beleaguered city of Dublin, and on 10 August was added to one of the committees on Ireland, specifically to respond to a petition from Protestant refugees.48PJ iii. 420; CJ ii. 713a. He could hardly have made a further significant contribution at Westminster to addressing this problem, however, since the same day he was again given leave to return home.49CJ ii. 713b. On 18 August he was required with other Pembrokeshire gentlemen including his brother, Arthur Owen*, to settle the militia for Parliament in their county.50LJ v. 304a-b. This order marked his last known involvement in this Parliament.

Pembrokeshire was a county slow to experience the impact of civil war, and it seems likely that Owen simply retired to his estates there, and did nothing significant in public life. His absence from the muster at Carmarthen, summoned by William Seymour†, marquess of Hertford, in November 1642 would have been noted as an affront to the king.51Pemb. Co. Hist. iii. 172. In contrast to Owen’s passive behaviour, his ally, John Poyer, fortified Pembroke ‘for king and Parliament’, and later plausibly listed, against the libels of his local enemies, his activities in the parliamentary cause.52A Declaration of Divers Gentlemen (1648), 2 (E.436.7); Poyer’s Vindication (1649), 2 (E.548.31). In April 1644, Simon Thelwall* could still praise Poyer as the ‘trusty and careful’ mayor of Pembroke.53S. Thelwall, A True Relation (1644), 3 (E.42.13). By 26 August 1643, the royalists had evidently written Owen off as one of theirs, since he was dropped from the commission of the peace that day. However, towards the end of October his name appeared in the Oxford newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, among those supporting Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery, the royalist commander in west Wales.54Mercurius Aulicus 43rd week (21-28 Oct. 1643), 605 (E.75.13). In January 1644 another such declaration included his name.55Mercurius Aulicus 4th week (21-27 Jan. 1644), 797-8 (E.32.17). At some point between then and the end of March, Owen left Pembrokeshire for Oxford. Thelwall presented this to the Commons as a forcible arrest on Carbery’s orders. Owen was said to have been taken while preparing for bed, ‘unbreasted and in his pantables’, because he resisted Carbery’s threats and blandishments. In this narrative, the cavaliers denounced him to his face as a ‘dissembling traitor’ and before he had time to dress properly bundled him away with his wife. In early April Thelwall reported him as still in detention. 56Thelwall, A True Relation, 6. Poyer later corroborated this version of events, and the Commons evidently considered him a captive of the king’s since an exchange of prisoners was considered.57Poyer’s Vindication, 5; CJ iii. 389b. On 30 March, the king’s pardon was extended to Owen, which must mean that he was considered open to persuasion, and on 11 April, John Vaughan I* expressed to Herbert Prise* his satisfaction that Owen was ‘for conditions’, and could see ‘he may prove of great use’.58Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 185; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 157.

His enemies alleged in April 1648 that Owen ‘sat with the junto’ in Oxford during the first civil war, but he was never admitted to the Oxford Parliament. He was said also to have gone to royalist Anglesey rather than return to Pembrokeshire after it had fallen under parliamentarian control.59CCAM 875. By contrast, Poyer asserted that Owen had been sent a prisoner by parliamentary soldiers to Wallingford, then back to Oxford before being considered for prosecution by commission of oyer and terminer. This must have occurred after 27 June 1646, when Wallingford castle fell to Parliament.60Poyer’s Vindication, 5-6. Before then, the question of Owen’s standing in the House was revisited. In February 1644 the Commons had postponed any decision on his case, and on 20 May 1646 it was referred to the committee on absent Members, with no evident result. In October, his estate was assessed by the Committee for Advance of Money as being worth £2,000 a year.61CJ iii. 390a, iv. 551b; CCAM 739. A year later (9 Oct. 1647), Owen was included, neutrally, in a list of absent Members: he was seemingly in political limbo.62CJ v. 330b. Allegations against Owen’s part in the first civil war were filed against him in April 1648, and in May his friend Poyer played a leading part in the ill-fated second civil war in south Wales, which ended in his arrest, court-martial and execution by firing-squad in Covent Garden (25 Apr. 1649).63CCAM 875; Oxford DNB, ‘John Poyer’. For his part, Owen seems prudently again to have refrained from any direct involvement in this episode, although Thomas Wogan* alleged that Owen’s servants went to join Poyer, Rice Powell and Owen’s cousin, Rowland Laugharne†, in the revolt.64Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 62. There seems no reason to believe that Owen was in London at the time of the purge of Parliament on 6 December 1648.

The House seems to have struggled to know what to make of Owen’s allegiances. On 23 February 1649, he was excepted out of the general act of composition that applied to all in south Wales who had taken arms for the king, doubtless judged guilty by association with Poyer, but by that summer his name appeared again in the commission of the peace for Anglesey. On 30 May 1649, Oliver Cromwell, always eirenic on such matters, reported that Owen was included in the articles of peace agreed for Anglesey, and should be freed of any further attention by the agencies of penal taxation.65CJ vi. 149b, 202a, 220a. This marked the beginning of Owen’s slow rehabilitation, marked by a brief re-appearance as a Pembrokeshire j.p. 1650-2, and consolidated by his appointment for a second term as sheriff.66CJ vii. 348b. The process picked up after Cromwell had become lord protector, when he was named in a number of Cromwellian ordinances and the commission of the peace for Anglesey, Pembrokeshire and Haverfordwest. One of the ordinances empowered him and his fellow commissioners to investigate the finances of the propagators of the gospel in Wales under the Rump Parliament, and he was sufficiently trusted to be appointed high sheriff of his county in 1653-4 and be included on the south Wales’ commissions for militia and securing the peace of the commonwealth in 1655. A contemporary allegation that he and his brother Arthur were secret royalist plotters seems implausible.67CSP Dom. 1655, p. 94; TSP i. 750; iv. 583.

At the fall of the Cromwellian protectorate, former suspicions of Owen re-surfaced, and he was not included in commissions of the peace issued by the revived Rump, except for Haverfordwest. Neither he nor his brother Arthur joined the Secluded Members on their return to Westminster in February 1660. Nevertheless, Owen was returned to the Convention of 1660 for Pembroke, though he made no known contribution to its proceedings. A contemporary assessment of him attributed his apparent vacillations to a reluctance to involve himself in public life; he was

as much as is understood of him a royalist so habituated to reservedness that it is thought he cannot now extricate himself, if he would from it; a lover of his country and justice, but noted by some to be too sparing or too modest to bear the burden of the affairs of his country, his interest and parts justly expecting more of his time and pains in his country’s service.68E.D. Jones, ‘The Gentry of South West Wales in the Civil War’, NLWJ xi. 143.

He seems to have shown no further interest in a parliamentary seat, but served a third term as sheriff of Pembrokeshire, 1663-4. He died at some point between making his will in September 1670, and the date of probate in June 1671. The memorial at Monkton, Pembrokeshire, recording his death date as August is evidently inaccurate.69Phillips, Mems. Owen of Orielton, 40-1. Owen’s eldest son, the second baronet, sat in five Parliaments, initially for Pembroke Boroughs, and then for the county, as a whig. His marriage with a kinswoman brought together again the Pembrokeshire and north Wales estates of the family.70Phillips, Mems. Owen of Orielton, 27.